I’ve been on holiday since 25 February, and I have even managed to go away. Hurrah! But fear not, I shall not post my holiday photographs. It was mostly very grey up there anyway. But even though I did not get any kind of holiday feeling while I was actually away, I do feel “off the treadmill” now that I am back. I’m going to hold onto that feeling while I can.
So although I am now back, I haven’t settled back to work yet. Posting will resume when I feel like it, when I get back to my projects; and specifically to Procopius of Gaza.
Instead I have been outdoors fiddling with a garden hose, inherited from my father. The connector on the end has failed, but I could not find another for sale on the web. Today I took the wretched thing into a plumbers’ merchant. He looked at it, and decided that it was not actually a connector at all, but rather part of a tap. He disappeared and brought back a tap, and, sure enough, there was an identical piece on the end! It seems that my dad simply adapted a piece of an old tap that he had lying around. The result served his purpose, and indeed it worked better than the commercial connectors that I have seen. He was an engineer, accustomed to making do with whatever was available, and this was one of his successes. Sadly I had to buy a whole new tap in order to get the same piece.
An hour ago I was lying on the sofa, and on a whim reread an old post that I wrote on the Welsh village of Llan Awst. I was rather surprised to find that a couple of the pictures were not longer displaying. This I have just fixed, but it is very odd that they were not there. Some odd, WordPressy thing had caused them to stop working. I wonder whether other posts have suffered the same glitch. I really ought to convert older posts to a static page.
While I was away, I found myself musing that I would like to have more monitors on my PC than I have. I have three, which is one more than I ever had in my working days, and quite nice all by itself. But six would be better. However, if I had more, I’d have to have two rows of them, one above the other. I suspect that this would swiftly result in a crick in the neck. So maybe I am best off as I am.
There is also the question of whether there are enough ports on the PC. Here I had a breakthrough. I discovered that I have more video ports than I thought I had. I always knew that I had three on the graphics card. But another two that I had not noticed on the motherboard also have sockets on the back, and can be used for non-game work, as I have verified. That gives me five ports. Also I believe that I could daisy-chain monitors, if I had monitors that had a “displayport-out” port, to get the sixth.
Sadly the monitors that I have are all very old Benq VW2245-T 21.5″ items, which don’t have any sort of displayport on them at all. They’re all identical and I got them dirt-cheap from eBay way back in 2018, second-hand at $50 a pop. At that time I was working from home very temporarily with a work-supplied laptop and a docking station. They wouldn’t lend me any screens, and I didn’t want to spend much money for a two-week job. Yet they’re perfectly serviceable. Indeed I don’t want larger screens, because I have no space.
These old Benq screens also lack a VESA socket on the back to attach a modern stand. They came with their own custom stands, which are fine. But this means that they can’t be used with a modern stand designed for multiple screens. If I had a row of screens above the current lot, I would need such a stand, probably floor-standing. It is possible to get a non-VESA adapter, to hook over the edge of the old screens, but these are ugly.
Likewise I find that you cannot get a displayport-out port on anything smaller than a 24″ monitor, and the ones that have them are $200 each. So three new ones would cost quite a bit, as well as being too large; six new ones would really cost a lot. So I think I will stick with my existing setup.
Today I was fretting a bit about how old some of my software is getting. But I’m not going to buy subscriptions of anything. I would like a new copy of Adobe Acrobat, or one not 20 years old; but no perpetual licenses are sold now. I will have to do something, tho, because it’s starting to have trouble with newer PDF files. Likewise I always bought every new version of Abbyy Finereader, so I am only one version behind. But the latest version has no perpetual license. Really Governments ought to do something about this “subscription” racket, where you have to buy your software again and again every year. But here too I think I will carry on as I am.
Tonight the fog swirls around my house. But the forecast for tomorrow is sunshine. So I suspect that I will drive out to the village where a lady friend lives, and we shall go out for tea and a scone somewhere. Perhaps in the afternoon I will wrestle with garden hoses; or perhaps not.
Good night everyone, and sweet dreams.